This blog is dedicated to the struggles of people everywhere to advance human progress and save this planet from the decline of capitalism. Its focus, since 2011 has been supporting the emerging revolutions everywhere.

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Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Israel's Right to Exist?

The Jews that suffered so at the hands of the Nazis and others had every right to seek refuge in Palestine.

What they had no right to do was to take other people's land by force, a practice which continues to this day. (see below)

They had no right to make the non-Jewish Palestinians second class citizens in their own land.

They have no right to kill a hundred Palestinians for every Israeli killed and call it self-defense.

They had no right to wipe Palestine off the map.

Try finding it on a map now. Like a thief crying 'stop thief', they charge everyone who is against Zionism, which is a particularly virulent form of racism, with wanting to wipe Israel off the map. Funny how people tend to fear most precisely what they have done to others.

I believe that no state that is based on the supremacy of any single race, religion or ethnic group has a right to exist. South Africa under apartheid had no right to exist. The Southern Confederacy had no right to exist. Nazi Germany had no right to exist. Islamic states have no right to exist. Where's the confusion?

If a Jewish state is okay, how about a White state, a Catholic state, etc? Once you establish a state in the name of a certain people, once you declare this or that partial of Earth in the name this or that people, you necessarily will discriminate or try to remove people already living on that partial of Earth that are not the chosen people and you will create a racist state. Israel cannot be a Jewish state and at the same time be a state in which all people are equal and it is equality that progress demands.

It's not a question of whether the country was the product of a hostile takeover. That is true of all countries if you look back far enough into their history. Even the native Americans that saw their country taken over by Europeans using African labor, had themselves taken the country by force from those that crossed the barrier straits a thousand years before them. The question is what is the basis of this or that state today? And while the U.S., as with most other countries, doesn't practice racial, religious or ethnic equality as good as it should it doesn't declare it is a state for this or that people. In the case of the U.S. and most other countries, we can demand that they live up to their ideas or rhetoric, but what can we to with a Jewish state except demand that it stop being a Jewish state?

In it's infancy Zionist was at best a concession to and acceptance of racism as an unalterable characteristic of human nature. I reject that basic premise.

The Jewish question persists wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers. Wherever it does not exist, it is brought in together with Jewish immigrants. We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilised countriessee, for instance, Franceso long as the Jewish question is not solved on the political level. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.

Note that he seems to blame the Jews for the anti-Semitism. They bring the seeds of anti-Semitism with them so if they go to England or America and face discrimination, it's their own fault. How sick is that? Clearly his idea of a political solution was not to fight for equality but to fight for segregation, abet, self-imposed. He also overlooks the fact that the Jews, particularly secular Jews, were among the most politically advanced people in Europe and so were carrying not only the seeds of their own liberation but that of all people to England and America. That is another reason they weren't welcomed by the powerful, but that is no reason to run away.

That same year he wrote in his diary "I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism."

He became convinced that European anti-Semitism could never be changed, so what to do? Get a partial of Earth just for the Jews. Here we see the racist nature of Zionism at it's core. It's another application of the corrupt philosophy 'if you can't beat them. join them.', and the terrible treatment of Arabs in Palestine is existentially justified because of the Holocaust in Europe.

There was a similar movement in the United States in the early 1800's to deal with problem of African slaves. The whites of the American Colonization Society were opposed to slavery but also opposed to integrating Blacks into American society, so they created a Black settler state in Africa known as Liberia [which meant liberty] in 1822 and started sending freed slaves back to Africa. Their reasoning was precisely the same as Herzl's. Henry Clay, a big supporter of Liberia said it was necessary because of the "unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, they never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country." The Black Americans that emigrated to Liberia called it the "Promised Land", suppressed the indigenous Black population and set up the Republic of Liberia on the U.S. model. Well, what was freedom for the relatively affluent Black Americans was certainly not that for the indigenous Blacks and the history of Liberia has been principally one of struggle between this elite minority and the indigenous people ever since. And this in a settler country were colonist and the indigenous people are of the same race and the supremacy of one group isn't written into the constitution.

Clearly Liberia was the wrong solution to the 'problem' of Blacks in America. The right solution is the one we are still struggling with. Discrimination is a problem that must be faced were it exists. Discrimination cannot be dealt with by displacing it to another people even less able to defend themselves and thus duplicating the discrimination elsewhere. And in both the case of Liberia and Israel, the oppressors of the would be settlers were more than happy to help them settle in someone else's land, both so that they could be rid of them and so they could be further exploited as imperialist tools against the indigenous population. Liberia was a willing tools of U.S. Imperialism in Africa as Israel is today.

Five Palestinian families in the Jordan Valley, in the eastern part of the
West Bank, received eviction orders from the Israeli military on Sunday,
just days after Israeli settlers set up an illegal outpost on the families'
land and took over a water well in the area. The eviction orders told the
families to vacate their homes and land within ten days so that Israeli
troops could occupy it.

According to a town council member from Atuf, Abdallah Bisharat, the
eviction will render 50 people homeless and, given that the families
receiving the notices are farming families dependent on their land for their
livelihoods. The evictions will be "devastating" for the families in
question.